Sol Orwell was at the forefront of the million dollar business trend, building Examine.com, a health information site he founded in 2011, to more than $1 million in annual revenue with a small team of contractors
But million-dollar sole proprietorships don’t stand still. (You can read about the early history of the business “A young entrepreneur’s passion for hacking his diet leads to a seven-figure business.”). While many founders delve into setting up solo boutique businesses without ever adding employees, others eventually choose to go the traditional route and scale up. Toronto-based Orwell takes a hybrid approach. He recently relaunched his site after tripling the size of his virtual team to about 25 people, with a mix of contractors and employees, and now projects about $2 million in revenue by 2022. His goal is to build the business with nine figure income.
“It’s important to have a job that really excites you, especially with the Great Resignation in mind,” says Orwell. “My mission is to build a company that I’m very proud of.”
Sol Orwell has called what was once a million-dollar, one-person business to about 25 team members.
Examine.com
Examine.com sells nutritional information, such as supplement guides, through a subscription model that costs $19 a month or a discounted $144 a year. Before the relaunch, he and his team organized the site around specific nutrients, such as vitamin D. Now the information is focused on the health challenges that drive people to look for nutrition-based solutions on the Internet, with 25 categories (such as “cardiovascular.” ”) covering 65 to 80 health conditions (such as “high blood pressure”). The site also provides information on “results”.
“People don’t care about vitamin D,” he says. “They care about ‘I have high blood pressure.'”
Orwell decided to relaunch the site after a rough patch for the company in 2019. “We had kind of lost our way,” says Orwell. “That’s one of the conundrums of the one-man business approach. To be honest, it was communication on our part, mission and vision. In mid-2019, we’re reconfiguring everything. We started towards the approach to holocracy and total financial transparency.” (Holocracy is a management system based on agile networks of people who organize themselves. With full transparency, it means that you share data like income and expenses with your team on a monthly basis.)
Things started to improve. Then Covid hit. “Covid annihilated us,” says Orwell. “Personal trainers, a huge customer segment, were wiped out.”
Orwell and his team doubled down on their search engine optimization and marketing work using their customer relationship management (CRM) software. They also assigned a Customer Success Associate to each customer. “From the moment someone buys, we want to make sure they’re not beaten,” he says.
This approach has been working, with the company now serving more than 10,000 customers. Although a change in Google’s algorithm took a huge toll on traffic at one point, it has bounced back in a big way. In addition to many customer reviews on Trustpilot, one thing that keeps visitors flocking is Examine.com’s approach to organizing information. If someone searches for “migraines,” they’ll find answers to common subquestions such as “Does not getting enough sleep cause migraines?” as well as a list of relevant migraine studies.
“Instead of visitors having to find it through 20 different blog posts, we put it all in one place,” he says.
To expand, Orwell had to double his investment in researchers. 75% of its payroll is made up of researchers, usually experts such as MDs and PhDs.
With the intention of creating an attractive work environment, he runs the company for four days a week and is introducing benefits such as four months of paid paternity leave. It has also introduced six months of maternity leave, which covers team members regardless of the outcome of the pregnancy. Monthly, the company provides 20% of pre-tax profits to employees.
What Examine doesn’t offer is unlimited vacation. “We try not to pay lip service to the company’s profits,” says Orwell. “Companies say you can take unlimited vacation. How many are still taking it?”
With the business desk, Orwell plans to grow the company to 40 employees within a year, a goal he seems to have no trouble achieving. Although Orwell has added complexity to the business, he still manages it using lean digital methods, such as communicating via Slack, rather than holding many formal meetings, an approach that appeals to many people. Another draw is the employee handbook made available to the public. “For five positions, 480 people applied,” he says.
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